Sunday, April 24, 2016

Remember the Germanic tribes that came thundering across the
frozen Rhine river (maybe) around 400 AD? They did quite well for themselves.
They carved up the western Roman empire, establishing kingdoms in France,
Spain, North Africa and Italy. By this time most of them were Christians. There
was a problem as far as the Catholics of the western Roman Empire were
concerned.

The Germans were Arian
(not to be confused with “Aryan,” the made-up race of Hitler and his friends.
Our Arians were the followers of the crackpot Egyptian Christian priest Arius
who, around 300AD, claimed there was no such thing as a Trinity). Christians
who believed that Jesus – though
really, really special – was not
eternal, but created in time. The people over whom new German kings ruled were
Trinitarian, Catholic Christians and could be troublesome. The King of the
Franks converted to Catholicism, but more about him later. Enter Reccared, the Visigoth king of
Spain as well as part of southern France from 586 to 601. He decided to
renounce Arianism and accept Catholicism.

The Third Council of Toledo (Spain, not Ohio)
met in King Reccared's name in May 589, and there his declaration accepting
Catholicism was read aloud. The Catholic bishop, St. Leander
preached the closing sermon, which his little brother St. Isidore called
the “…triumph of the Church upon the conversion of the Goths”. Some say that
King Reccared celebrated the triumph of Catholicism by forcing Jews and Arians
to convert to mainline Catholicism. Others blame St. Leander and the Catholic
bishops for the new anti-Jewish attitude in Spain. Jews had been guaranteed
certain freedoms in the Church laws of Spain, but after the council of Toledo
those freedoms were increasingly limited. Reccared’s involvement in the new
anti-Semitism of the young Spain is disputed by modern historians, but what do
they know anyway?

No matter whose fault
it was, things got a lot tougher for Jews in Spain. The important reason as far
as this disquisition goes, is the why of the new anti-Semitism. The why is
quite simple: replacement theology, at least that’s the theory of the brilliant
David Goldman in his 2011 book How
Civilizations Die. The theory
goes like this. In order to sweet talk King Reccared into becoming the new
protector of the Church, it was aired about that the Visigoths, at least the
Catholic ones, were the new “chosen people” of God. You can’t have two chosen
peoples. God must have dumped one and taken up with the other. This arrangement
had already been hinted at in the Christianization of the Roman Empire, but
since the empire was just that, an empire, you didn’t really have a people so
much as a collection of peoples. The emperors however already saw themselves as
the chosen vessels of God.

Emperor Constantine
who began the Christian-ization of the Roman Empire in the early fourth century
had himself buried in the church of the Holy Apostles, the idea being that he
was also an apostle of God chosen to do God’s work on earth. The plan was to gather relics of all of the
Apostles in the church so that Constantine could spend eternity in the company
of his fellow apostles. They only managed to get Saint Andrew, Saint Luke and Saint Timothy, only one of whom is
actually an apostle, but the point had been made. In the Orthodox Church,
Constantine is still called “isapostolos” or in English “the equal of the Apostles.”

In the western
kingdoms it was possible to go the whole route. Baptize a king, and you baptize
a whole nation. The chosen people was us! It didn’t matter if I believed it.
The king believed it. We believed it. Depending on whose bread was to be
buttered, the Franks, the Burgundians the Lombards, the Vandals the Visigoths
as well the Ostrogoths, and any other Goth who managed to conquer a country and
wear a crown could be the chosen people, and it anointed sovereign, a New
Israel and a new Solomon or David.

Since then nations have regularly decided that they are the
new chosen people. The Spanish, the English, the Irish, the list is rather
long. The Germans and the Russians were late to assume the mantle of
chosen-ness. They decided they were chosen nations sometime in the nineteenth
century and they did so with a vengeance. The problem with being a chosen
nation was that there were always those pesky Jews, who used to be chosen. Best
to be rid of them, no? It is interesting to me that one cannot find the phrase
“New Israel” in the New Testament. There is new covenant and new Jerusalem, but
no new Israel.

In its beginning, the
Church grew by individual conversion claiming that one could be adopted into
the people of Israel by baptism. All one needed now was water, buckets and a
tribe of barbarians whose king told them to go along with the whole thing. Up
until that point one joined Israel by personal conversion. The Gentile,
the non-Jew, could join himself to Israel of God by baptism. In effect he
joined a people. He became member of the tribe of Christians as Josephus the
Jewish historian of the first century called us. However, when you move from
God’s choice of persons as members of his chosen people the whole thing
changes.

There was no more tribe of Christians there were the Christian tribes of
the Vandals or the Visigoths or the Franks, who happened to be the first to
take the plunge into the Catholic, Roman, non-Arian baptismal pool. The Franks
had great names like Kings Chlodiwg,Sigebert, Chilperic, Queen Brunhilda and Queen Fredegunda, who couldn’t stand
each other. I mention them just because these are really cool names. King
Chlodwig, however, is important for our story.

He was the first of
the Arian German kings to convert to Catholicism, admittedly under pressure
from his Catholic wife Queen Clothilda. He realized that it could be a win-win
situation. The pope in Rome was being browbeaten by the emperor in
Constantinople, and Chlodwig – or as you may know him, Clovis – was being browbeaten by
his Romano-Gallic nobility in what is now France. When he became a Catholic,
the pope got a protector and Clovis got legitimacy in France. It was smiles all
around. The dynasty of Clovis eventually gave way to the dynasty that included
Charlemagne, God’s chosen monarch par excellence!
The Franks slowly became the French who talked about the deeds of God through
the French (Gesta Dei per Francos).
They never quite got over the idea, at least not until recently when they,
along with the rest of Europe stopped believing in God.

Where did this leave
the un-chosen Jews? Pretty much moving from country to country until the czars
of Russia invited them to live in the Slavic lands of the east. By the way,
King Clovis, the king of the Franks and protector of the Roman Church was buried
in; you guessed it... a church in France called the Church of the Holy
Apostles, just like Constantine.

Next week: How the
west lost its Christian faith 400 years ago and nobody noticed until just now.

Sunday, April 17, 2016

There were three major centers of Christianity by
the year 150 AD, Antioch in Asia, Alexandria in Africa, and Rome in Europe.
These were called the patriarchates, or “father churches.” Jerusalem had been
levelled and replaced by the Roman city of Aelia Capitolina and Constantinople
didn’t yet exist. These three father churches were thought to be of special
distinction because of their founding by St. Peter, whom Jesus chose as leader of
the early Church. Peter had founded the church in Antioch, Syria and through
his delegate St. Mark was considered the founder of the church in Alexandria,
Egypt, but above all, the church founded by St. Peter and also by St. Paul was
Rome.

Peter and Paul had both died there and their
relics remained there. The early Christians considered the Roman church the
first of the churches as evidenced by St. Ignatius of
Antioch and St. Irenaeus
of Lyon. Around 650 AD, the armies of a new prophet swept out of the Arabian
Peninsula and in short order captured two of the original patriarchates, Alexandria
and Antioch and thus began the slow but steady erosion of Christianity in the
lands of its beginning. Rome, too, had been conquered by the Germanic tribes of
the west, but something else happened there. The conquerors were converted by
the conquered and soon there were mass baptisms of Germanic tribes into the
Roman Church. They may have become Christians, but the mass conversions meant
that they were not the most literate nor best educated of believers. Among
these new Christians, the Jews continued in their uneasy but useful position,
living their lives largely without threat to life and limb. (Note: I use the
world “largely.” There were certainly some incidents of major persecution
during the era, but nothing like what was to come.)

Christianity in the East held on under the new
rulers and their new religion. In fact, the invaders didn’t try to convert
them. The Christians paid a special tax and their governmental and technical
expertise was useful to the new masters. That started to change in around 900 AD.300 years after the first Arab invasion of
Roman Christian territory, the great Christian centers, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia
started to become Arabized. Christians found themselves under increasing
pressure to convert to the new religion. There had been an increase during the
previous century in the persecution of those Christians still remaining in the
Holy Land and pilgrimage to the Christian shrines had been forbidden. In
addition to the increasing Arabic pressure, a central Asian people, the Turks
accepted the new religion and its prophet, and did so with the devotion of new
converts.

An ambassador from Constantinople arrived in Rome
in 1095 from the Byzantine/Roman emperor Alexius asking for help against these
new invaders, the Turks who were invading what was left of the old Roman
Christian empire. The pope called a council in Clermont in
France and urged the nobility of Europe to come to the aid of their Christian
brothers in the east in addition to the depredation of the Turkish invaders.

Around this same time, the Fatimid Caliph of
Cairo al-Hakim, (or Hakim the crazy to those who knew him well) under whose
jurisdiction the Holy Land fell, decreed that the Christians would no longer be
allowed to observe the feasts of Epiphany or Easter. Wine was outlawed not just
for Muslims but for Christians, which made the celebration of Mass impossible,
and wasn’t much appreciated by Jews either who use wine in their religious
rituals. In 1005, he ordered Jews and Christians to wear distinctive item of
clothing. In1009, al- Hakim ordered the destruction of the Holy Sepulcher in
order to end the Holy Fire
ceremony that he was sure was a fraud. Eventually all Christian religious
buildings in the Holy Land were confiscated or destroyed. The situation in the
Holy Land, and the Turkish juggernaut into the remaining Christian territory,
(which was only stopped in 1683 at the gates of Vienna,) finally woke up a
sleeping Christendom. The nobility of Europe “took the cross,” that is, they
pledged themselves to make pilgrimage to the holy sites. Access to the
Christian shrines could only be had by means of war with the rulers of the
east.The nobility of Europe prepared
for war. The peasants of Europe were not to be outdone by the nobility and felt
no need to prepare. God would help them! A holy (and probably looney) hermit
named Peter decided to act on the pope’s call to liberate the formerly
Christian lands of the east. He gathered 20,000 peasants together in Easter
1096 and declared a people’s crusade. They promptly started the march to
Jerusalem though they weren’t quite sure where Jerusalem was. This did not
strike them as a problem.

At one
point they seem to have been led by a goose. I quote Albert of Aachen, a
contemporary source:

“There was also another abominable wickedness
in this gathering of people on foot, who were stupid and insanely
irresponsible…They claimed that a certain goose was inspired by the Holy Ghost,
and a she-goat filled with no less than the same, and they had made these their
leaders for this holy journey to Jerusalem; they even worshipped them
excessively, and as the beasts directed their courses for them in their animal
way, many of the troops believed they were confirming it to be true according
to the entire purpose of the spirit.”

Things soon went from stupid to evil when the
goose died and was replaced by politicians. Peter the Hermit was
joined by Count Emicho of
Flonheim who knew a good thing when he saw it. The peoples crusade arrived in Germany in spring
1096, and promptly started slaughtering Jews, the reasoning being, “We don’t
have to wait until Jerusalem to kill the enemies of Christ, we’ve got plenty of
Jews right here in the Rhine valley.” In Speyer, Worms, Mainz and Cologne, Jews
died by the thousands despite the efforts by Catholic bishops to protect them.
Things changed for "We’re right. You’re wrong.” to “We’re right. You’re
dead.” When they finally got the Roman/Byzantine Empire, they were ambushed by
the Turks and what goes around comes around. Of the 20,000 only 3,000 survived.
The delicate balance ended. Jews became even useful to the moneyed interests of
the west. Now there was a way to cancel debts to Jewish moneylenders. Preach a
crusade and kill the Jews. How efficient!

Sunday, April 10, 2016

December
31, 406, or maybe 405 the Rhine River froze solid or maybe it didn’t. What did
happen is this: three
German tribes, the Vandals, Alans and Suebi, managed to cross the Rhine. The Rhine and the Danube were
the natural northern borders of the Roman Empire, which had been Christian for
almost a century. One can picture a German barbarian walking out on the ice
stamping his feet and shouting, “Come on,
Hildegund, Schnell! Vee is moofing to France!”

In the search for plumbing, wine
and the other amenities of Roman life, the German barbarians crossed the border
en masse and there just weren’t
enough soldiers to stop them. The bulk of the army was back in the east
fighting Visigoths, the Germanic cousins of the Vandals and their friends. The
Roman Empire in the west pretty much crumbled. The Visigoths reached Italy from
the east while the Vandals went down through France and Spain and reached Italy from the North
African coast. Rome was sacked
by the Visigoths in 410 and again really sacked by the Vandals in 455.

The Vandals and the Visigoths
were Christian – sort of. They were Arians.
Remember the Arians? They were the people who thought the idea of a Triune God
was crazy and Ariansim
appealed to militarist monarchies like the Germans with its neat chain of
command. The German barbarians took their religion seriously and thus were not
very nice to any Trinitarian Nicene Catholics who got in their way. One of
those Nicene Catholics was St Augustine, the
bishop of the town of Hippo Regius in what is now Algeria. (Did you know that
North Africa, just like Egypt, Turkey, Syria and the Holy Land were once the
heartlands of the Catholic faith?) The Vandals besieged Hippo as St. Augustine
lay dying and eventually captured the city, burning everything except
Augustine’s cathedral and library. The survival of so many of his writings
insured that he would be one of the greatest theological influences in Europe.
He commented on just about everything in his 75 years and he was the dominant
voice in the western attitude toward the Jews for almost a thousand years.

Augustine was never shy about his opinions. He
was always denouncing heretical opinions. He thoroughly denounced any movements
in the Church that rejected the Hebrew Scriptures and the fierce tribal God of
the Jews. Augustine held the Catholic view that the God of the New and Old
Testaments were one and the same, that the Old Testament was divinely inspired
and that the Jews were a people specially chosen by God. They were chosen in
the Old Testament to bring forth the messiah. They were chosen in the New
Testament for a somewhat less desirable task. Augustine believed Jewish people
would be converted at the end of time, but the destruction of the temple and
the scattering of Jews by Rome fulfilled Old Testament prophecy. God had spared
them in their unconverted state as a warning to Christians of what could happen
to those who reject Christ. They should be allowed to live unmolested in
Christian lands and lead free and unhindered lives.

Augustine believed that the Old Testament
referred to the Jews in the verse, “Slay them not, lest they should at last
forget Your law” (Psalm 59:11). Augustine. (God) has said, ‘but whosoever shall
kill Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.’… not by bodily death
shall the ungodly race of carnal Jews perish. For whoever destroys them in this
way shall suffer sevenfold vengeance, that is, shall bring upon himself the
sevenfold penalty under which the Jews lie for the crucifixion of Christ. ’So
to the end of the seven days of time, the continued preservation of the Jews
will be a proof to believing Christians of the subjection merited by those who,
in the pride of their kingdom, put the Lord to death.” (St. Augustine, “Contra
Judaeos”) It sounds pretty awful at first read, but Augustine’s likening
the Jews to Cain threatened anyone who would harm them with a curse. (Looking
at modern German, French and Russian demographics, Augustine may have had a
point!)

So from the year 400 AD until almost 1100 AD, the
teaching of Augustine prevailed in the west and the Jews became a protected and
increasingly valued (though not necessarily beloved) part of European society.
Christian Europe had a problem. The Scriptures seemed to forbid usury, the
taking interest on a loan from a fellow Christian. How does one do business
without a system of credit? Enter the Jews. There was no law in scripture that
forbad having the infidel Jews loaning money at interest to their Christian
neighbors.

Jews were a readymade banking society. They were
a small group of very mobile people who had trusted contacts throughout the
Middle East and Europe among their fellow Jews scattered throughout the world.
They were able to travel and do business where a Muslim or Christian might be
unwelcome, and they were literate! The great emperor Charlemagne (800 AD) was
never quite able to write his own name, though he really tried. Jews could read
write and count! Jews became the grease that allowed the wheels of commerce to
turn in an increasingly isolated and illiterate world. It was always good to
have a few of them around, not too many, but a few. So it went until 1096.

Next week: Count Emicho and a goose filled with
the Holy Spirit (I’m not making this up either!)

Rev. Know-it-all

About Me

Rev. Know-it-all is the alter ego of Fr. Richard Simon, Pastor of St. Lambert Parish, Skokie, IL.
Now a regular host of Relevant Radio's "Fr. Simon Says", Fr. Simon spent over 20 years "...teaching dead languages to comatose seminarians."
Credits: The Reverend Know-It-All is a parody of Mr. Know-It-All, the alter ego of Bullwinkle J. Moose, a carton character created by Jay Ward (1920-1989).